| I come from a musical family, but not in the performance sense: We are Listeners. We’ve all been caught by the bug at one time or another, exhibiting the usual obsessive-compulsive tendencies that come with serious collecting, but whereas music appreciation is a virus for my parents and sister — not always there but never fully gone — it’s a terminal disease for my brother and me.
My story begins with a children’s portable record player. It was a self-contained unit in a white textured plastic case with a red-orange interior. There was a hole in the case for the power cord and a handle for easy carrying. It played 7-inch records at two speeds. The storybook records — they got the most spins — were always 33 rpm. My Christmas 45s also were favorites. My first adult record, at the age of 7, was the 45 single of “Up Where We Belong,” the theme from An Officer and a Gentleman sung by Joe Cocker and Jennifer Warnes. Why a 7-year-old boy wanted this record is one for the psychologists to pick apart; the only thing I remember about it is the first copy I got had a huge scratch and my mom took me back to the mall to exchange it.
In any case, it was that first record player that got me hooked. That and my parents’ stereo, which could play my small collection of 12-inch children’s LPs. I also developed a taste for adult music early in life and would drop the needle on anything, just in case it was good (nothing’s changed). I usually chose records by album cover, as I imagine most kids do. It’s a practice that continues today — some of my favorite albums have come into my life based on the way they looked or felt in my hands.
As a typical ’80s kid, I went through a cassette phase. Compact discs followed in the ‘90s once I saved enough lawn-mowing money to buy a system. I made my return to vinyl in college. Since high school, I had been reading about vinyl’s resurgence, particularly among the indie and alternative rock bands that began flooding my collection post-Nevermind, but it wasn’t until I started haunting college record stores — which actually carried the vinyl I had been reading about — did I acquire my first turntable in more than 15 years. Now I have four.
I got into vinyl at a good time. It was cheap, few people wanted it and artists and labels were starting to pay special attention to it. Nowadays, I can’t pass a record store without going in, and rarely can I resist the urge to flip through stacks at a thrift store or stop at a garage sale. For a while, my LPs and CDs lived in harmony, but as I evolved into a serious, educated listener, a preference for vinyl emerged. As a writer, I appreciate process, and I found the interactive vinyl listening experience to be far more rewarding than simply pressing play and clocking out. As a visual person, I found LP art work to be far more dynamic and alive than its compact disc counterpart. And as a purist, I found the analog warmth and tonal range of the LP to be far superior sonically.
All of it adds up to a desire to share my appreciation for the form with other vinyl listeners, educate the curious on its merits and continue to explore music listening as an activity of importance and intention.
So, yeah, I am a Listener, and the inevitable question among Listeners is, What do you listen to? There are myriad clever responses to that, and usually I’m prone to answering with something vague like “everything” or something pretentious like “good,” but l’ll just leave it at this: Religious men have their churches, I have my records. I read liner notes like some people read Scripture. Whatever you want to call It — God, Buddha Nature, Wendy — I feel closer to It when I listen to music. It’s a spiritual experience, and as with all matters of the spirit, there is an endless search for fulfillment. I know my thirst will never be fully quenched, at least not until I can listen to multiple songs at the same time and hear them independent of one another. Maybe in the next life. |
